Patrizia’s chirp was half disbelief, half delight. “What would Nereo say? First his particles have spread out into waves, and now they’re spinning at the same time.”
Romolo gazed down at the spectra he’d brought. “So when we arrange the light field in the optical solid so the luxagen’s energy depends on its motion… it makes sense that it also depends on its spin.” The mystery that had spurred the night’s calculations had all but yielded. He looked up at Carla. “We can quantify the way the energy depends on the spin now, can’t we? The new wave equation will let us do that!”
Carla said, “Tomorrow.”
The three of them left the office together. The corridors of the precinct were empty, the rooms they passed dimmed to moss-light. “Your cos don’t mind how late you work?” Carla inquired.
“I moved out a few stints ago,” Patrizia said. “It’s easier.”
“I’ll probably do the same,” Romolo decided. “I don’t want to end up with children in the middle of this project!” He spoke without a trace of self-consciousness, but then added, “My co’s not ready either. We’ll both be happier without the risk.”
They parted, and Carla made her way up the axis to Carlo’s apartment. He was still awake, waiting for her in the front room.
“You’re looking better,” she said, gesturing to him to turn around so she could check that he wasn’t just relocating his wounds.
“I’m fine now,” Carlo assured her.
“So have the arborines bred yet?” Carla found the new project grotesque, but she didn’t want his ordeal in the forest to have been for nothing.
“Give them time.”
“How’s the influence peddling?” she asked.
“Some progress,” Carlo said cautiously. “We’ve managed to get tapes from a few people with infectious conditions—and they’re definitely putting out infrared.”
“And you let that tainted light fall on your own skin?”
“We make the recordings from behind a screen,” Carlo assured her. “We’re as careful as we can be. But these things are probably all over the mountain; I’m sure you’ve been exposed to all the same influences without even knowing it.”
“And now you need a volunteer who’ll let you play these tapes back to them, to see if they catch the disease?” It sounded like one of the tales from the sagas, where tracing the words of a forbidden poem on someone’s skin could strike them dead.
“We’re still working on the player,” he said. “But that would be the next step.”
Carlo extinguished the lamp and they moved into the bedroom. “You’re not skipping meals again, are you?” he asked sternly.
“No!” Carla helped him straighten the tarpaulin. “I’ll wait a few more stints, to be sure I’m having no more problems with my vision.” He didn’t reply, but she could see that he wasn’t happy. “It has to be done,” she said. “I’ll take it more slowly this time, but I can’t put it off forever.”
Carlo said, “I want you to wait another year before you risk your sight again. Wait and see what your choices are.”
“Another year?” Carla drew herself into the bed and lay in the resin-coated sand. He really thought he had a chance to compose his magic light poem by then, to spare her from Silvana’s fate? “But what if something happens first?” She looked up at him in the moss-light. “Before I’m ready?”
Carlo reached across her and pulled an object out of a storage nook on her side of the bed. It was a long, triangular hardstone blade, with three sharp edges tapering to a point.
“If I ever wake you in the night and start trying to change our plans,” he said, “show me this. That should bring me to my senses.”
Carla examined his face. He was serious. “And what if I’m the one who wakes you?”
He returned the knife to its hiding place and produced a second one from the other side of the bed.
34
Carlo arrived a few chimes early to take over from Macaria. Having done the arborine night shift himself for a stint he knew how tiring it was: the less active the animals were, the harder it had been to keep watching them closely without his mind wandering. It was only by constantly reminding himself of what a few lapses of inattentiveness might cost him that he’d managed to stay awake to the end of each shift.
“Anything unusual?” he asked.
“Zosimo was up for about a bell, leaping around the cage,” Macaria recounted. “At one point he woke his co; I was sure something was going to happen. But in the end all they did was exchange a few calls. Benigna and Benigno slept through all the drama.”
“Hmm.” Carlo had read old reports, written on the home world, claiming that arborines in the forests had been seen waking at night in order to breed. But he had doubts about the veracity of those accounts, let alone their relevance to these captives twice removed from their ancestors’ original habitat.
“There ought to be something we can do to encourage them,” Macaria said wearily. “Both couples are reproductively mature, so what are they waiting for? There must be some environmental change that would clinch it. Maybe a dietary signal—”
“If we increase the food supply any more, we risk them becoming quadraparous,” Carlo replied.
“Would that be so terrible? If you really want to understand the signaling during fission, aren’t you going to need to compare biparous and quadraparous versions at some point?”
That might have been a reasonable attitude if they’d had an unlimited supply of experimental subjects, and as many lifetimes as they needed to achieve the project’s goal. Carlo said, “If we don’t get a tape of biparous fission from this lot, you can volunteer to catch the next four arborines.”
Macaria left him to it.
Carlo positioned himself on the guide rope midway between the two cages, at a point where he could see Benigna and Benigno in his rear gaze and Zosima and Zosimo to the front. The flowers adorning the scaffolding of amputated branches that crisscrossed each cage were still putting out light, more or less following their original alternating cycles, but over the last few days he’d begun to notice a decline in their luminance. As the imitation forest faded the moss-light took over, and the whole place began to look more like a prison of bare rock decorated with a few wan twigs.
The observers’ shifts were synchronized to the arborines’ activity, and he’d arrived just in time to watch all four animals waking. The females, pinned to their heavy plinths, had long ago ceased making vigorous attempts to detach themselves, but their posture and movements changed completely once they were conscious, with the uncoordinated twitches and flailing of sleep replaced by an eerily disciplined-looking series of muscular stretches and rearrangements of the flesh. Benigna and Zosima in their separate cages performed an almost identical set of exercises, which suggested that they were instinctive responses to their lack of mobility—perhaps as a way of maintaining health while recovering from an injury. But it was possible that there was a component of mimicry as well; from their plinths, they could see each other clearly enough. Mimicry? Encouragement? Solidarity? Zosima had carried Benigna’s limp body through the forest unflaggingly while Carlo pursued her. It was hard not to think of the two of them as fellow prisoners, aware of each other’s plight, striving to keep up each other’s morale.